Google to pay biggest FTC fine ever for tracking Safari users

Advertising cookies placed by "accident" have resulted in a $22.5 million fine.

Google has agreed to pay a $22.5 million civil penalty for installing tracking cookies on Safari by circumventing the default privacy settings in Apple's browser, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

The fine "is the largest penalty the agency has ever obtained for a violation of a Commission order," the FTC said on Thursday. The commission also said Google is required to "disable all the tracking cookies" that were at issue in the complaint. That part of the order is largely ceremonial, as Google already disabled the advertising cookies in February after claiming that they were spread by accident.

"In its complaint, the FTC charged that for several months in 2011 and 2012, Google placed a certain advertising tracking cookie on the computers of Safari users who visited sites within Google’s DoubleClick advertising network, although Google had previously told these users they would automatically be opted out of such tracking, as a result of the default settings of the Safari browser used in Macs, iPhones and iPads," the FTC said.

Google exploited a hole in Safari's privacy setting by placing a temporary cookie from the DoubleClick domain, which opened the door to all cookies including an advertising tracker "that Google had represented would be blocked from Safari browsers." By misrepresenting how it would deploy cookies, Google violated an FTC settlement it signed in October 2011 due to deceptive privacy practices in the Google Buzz social network.

Although Google agreed to pay the $22.5 million fine, the settlement "does not constitute an admission by the defendant that the law has been violated," the FTC said.